Summer, early 1990s

head in my door and tells me in no uncertain terms to turn it off.

Our house on Robinsons Rd is perched on a huge piece of land. I can run forever and do straw angels in a field of long, blonde, sun-bleached grasses and biddy bids that stick to my Adidas three-stripes.

Squatting down, I peer into the creek at the front of our house and poke into its depths with a stick. What we kids called cokabullies, but are actually just called bullies, plip at the water’s edge and my eyes meet those of an eel as it shimmies its belly through leafy green foliage.

I feel weird, different, like I just don’t fit. In maths class, I pierce my ears using the compass I am meant to be using to solve equations. The teacher wears tiny shorts and talks to the class with one of his feet perched up on a desk offering those sitting near the front an unfortunate view. I dye my hair green, blue, pink.

Mum says ‘‘girls can do anything’’.

Dad greets me each morning with bemused glances over the top of his newspaper.

Heading to Auckland for a music festival, on my blue Sony CD walkman is Sonic Youth’s Goo.

Obsessed with Kim Gordon’s vibe – I emulate her fashion choices and hairstyle – I thrash Kool Thing which has another of my musical heroes, Public Enemy’s Chuck D:

‘‘Are you going to liberate us girls from male, white, corporate oppression? Fear of a Female Planet’’.

It’s summer but a chrysalis on a kowhai tree is fulgent with frost. I sit, my back against it, listening to Goo and watching the sea ebbing and flowing with pools of light.

I am on a new island for the first time. The water tastes different. I feel a longing for home in the South Island.

But, at the front of the festival crowd waiting for Soundgarden, something clicks in my chest. Among the thousands of bones and skulls waiting to dance, finally I feel like I belong.

In a phonebox in a strange town, I call home. ‘‘Good as gold,’’ says Dad.

Summer, 2012

Former TV host Olly Ohlson is counselling children affected by the earthquake.

He visits my young children. I make him a cup of tea and offer him a gingernut. It’s so strange yet it feels almost circular.

In the bizarre post-earthquake Christchurch landscape, Ohlson says he has been forced to become an activist to try to save his red-zoned home in Brooklands.

Interviewing a GNS scientist about unknown faultlines following the devastating 2011 Christchurch earthquake, I am shaken when he says they have discovered an old faultline on Robinsons Rd.

Suddenly I return to the creek, the eels. I remember the dips of the undulating land on Robinsons Rd with fresh eyes.

The safe place of my childhood, shattered. Outside work, in the CBD red zone accessed via a military cordon, I stand with a colleague and we watch as a digger driver demolishes a building on Gloucester St.

The driver revs the engine and stares ahead. The scene reminds me of a documentary about a Spanish bullfighter. He looks across at us, nods and turns up the stereo volume. As the building crumbles like matchsticks before our eyes, he loudly plays Where is My Mind by Pixies.

Summer, 2015

Over the phone I interview Peter ‘‘Hooky’’ Hook of Joy Division. It’s a dream come true. As a teen, I could never have imagined it.

Dad reads it in his newspaper at the kitchen table.

‘‘Good as gold,’’ he says.

Summer, 2018

Returning to Robinsons Rd for the first time in more than 10 years on a rainy day in December, the creek is empty now, lifeless.

On my phone I find a photo of my parents I took on their 50th wedding anniversary in March.

They’re laughing in it because Dad’s cellphone, which he never uses, had rung out of the blue, startling him so much he’d dropped it and missed a call from the hospital.

Showing a friend the photo, we marvel at their 50 shared years. She comments wistfully: ‘‘Loving parents are the greatest gift.’’

Yes, they’re as good as gold.